It's either the near future, the far future, or even the present, where there's a hopeless bleak war being fought, where even a major victory is just a hollow one. The population could be reduced to small numbers because of this endless war. In some cases the war could even be a stalemate for the two opposing factions resulting in severe casualties on both sides.

Examples

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Anime and Manga

The Anime series Attack on Titan. A century of hiding from man-eating titans, where sacrificing hundreds of thousands of people to 'reclaim' land from the titans (i.e. get slaughtered en masse) is a practical idea, where no territory taken by the giants has ever been reclaimed by humans, where it is normal to be Eaten Alive. Things have gotten more hopeful with the revelation of Eren's Titan powers and the fact that they recaptured Trost from the titans. There is also an ongoing plan to recapture Wall Maria from the titans.

Before the four year timeskip, a new war is introduced: the island of Paradis, and potentially the Eldians in Marley, against the entire rest of the world, who apparently want nothing more than to see them dead.

In the Anime series Mobile Suit Gundam starts off as this. Zeon was effectively fighting a hopeless war vs. the Federation forces, with all of their big cards pretty much played from the start. The stalemate is the sign things is going to go downhill for them. Other Hopeless Wars in Gundam include the First Alliance-PLANT War (where the Alliance had to resort to suicidal last measures just to stave ZAFT off, though the tables were turned when they developed their own Mobile Suits), Kataron vs. A-Laws and the Federation vs. Cosmo Babylon. The losing side being the former respectively.

The war in Mobile Suit Gundam wasn't even a long one. Less than a year into it at the start of the series. Over half the human race had already been wiped out. It's known in later series as the "One Year War", which saw the devastation of Earth, the genocide of several colony clusters, and a final death toll somewhere around 5 billion.

The entire point of Saikano is that one of these is causing the death of the planet. Chise pulls a planet-wide Mercy Kill to keep everyone from suffering anymore; the series is exactly two characters away from a full-on Shoot the Shaggy Dog.

Sousei no Onmyouji The human exorcists have been on the losing side in their war against the Basara for the past millennium, due to the Basara having relatively long life spans and the ability to absorb the powers of defeated exorcists.

In every version of Space Battleship Yamato (both the original series, the 2010 movie and the remake), the series starts with Humans fighting one against Gamilas, with Earth being devastated by planetary bombs and Earth ships being hopelessly outclassed by Gamilas' ones (to drive home the point, the original series, the movie and the remake all open with a battle scene in which Earth ships are outnumbered by a 2-1 margin, Gamilas' weapons are one-hit kills on most Earth ships, and Earth weapon shots bounce away from Gamilas ships).

This is the case in Yuki Yuna Is a Hero. The girls are being forced to fight monsters known as Vertex, which are unending in number and are simply reconstructed after being defeated.In the last episode, they do manage to at least earn a reprieve from their attacks, but it's still implied they'll come back eventually.

What Frank Castle's one-man war on crime unfortunately comes down to. He knows that he will never be able to have any long-lasting effect on crime, no matter how many capos or drug dealers he kills. Best exemplified at the end of The Slavers arc from The Punisher MAX, where even after dealing with the heads of the human trafficking operation, the slavery ring in New York doesn't stop, it just gets more "sophisticated".

Almost every iteration of the Days of Future Past storyline in X-Men. In the future, the world is overrun. The Sentinels have Turned Against Their Masters so even baseline humans aren't safe. Someone is sent to the past Terminator style because there is no restoring the world in the future. Many big-name X-Men who are usually immune to even temporary Comic Book Death in the present are long dead. As the present characters rush to prevent it from happening, the future characters fight to give them "long enough" to do it, as opposed to winning, which is often accepted from the beginning as impossible. The animated versions make it less bad - but less bad doesn't mean "good," it means "all the Family-Unfriendly Death must take place offscreen, and we're spreading the storyline over long enough that we can't Kill 'em All straight away, but it's still a miserable world to live in and not letting it ever come to be is humanity's only hope."

One of these is the backstory for the ExcaliburAnti-Villain Albion. Basically, in his world, World War 1 didn't end in 1918, but just went on, and on, and on. By the time he was born, there was basically nothing of the world left, every government was gone, every resource used up. And then he gets super-powers, and the means to end the war. There's nothing to rebuild, and people start dying from rampant disease and starvation. Then Albion learns someone is responsible for all this...

The war against God-King Lore in Birthright is a recurring theme among the main characters. In the backstory, the world of Terrenos was controlled by a demonic Evil Overlord that corrupted everything as he saw fit. As a ragtag group of mages was assembled to defeat him and while they were very powerful at first, the war against Lore dragged out for years and they were nowhere near close to hurting him in the first place, let alone defeating him. It didn't help that the mages lost their loved ones and with each battle, more and more innocents were killed in the crossfire. Eventually they came to the conclusion that the fight was lost and they made a new home on Earth, placing protective barriers so that Lore would never invade our world. In the actual story, the main protagonist Mikey Rhodes gets a taste of this trope when he is pulled from Earth to fight with Lore because he is The Chosen One destined to kill Lore. As a young teen forced to witness the horrors of war, he ends up breaking too—though unlike his predecessors, he strikes up a bargain with Lore to return home and serve as his agent instead.

For humanity, millions of people have become War Refugees over the course of the war thanks to the barrier, which annihilates any human or human-made object in its way (not even leaving dust behind). Not only that, but the barrier is nigh-unstoppable, and every human knows it. It took a minor miracle for the PHL and the American military to even delay the thing, and the world is painfully aware, to the point that the U.S President has resigned himself to a Godzilla Threshold plan that could destroy all life on Earth, with the small hope it will at least do something to the barrier, even as it kills them all. But now that the Canon Equestrians have arrived, it may not be so hopeless anymore.

For TCB!Equestria/the Solar Empire, humanity's determination to fight their ponification crusade and the sheer brutality of their more advanced weaponry has caused a massive loss in lives, rendering the Empire's old fashioned tactics for the Royal Guards and Zerg Rush usage of the newfoals impractical. On top of that, the massive influx of newfoals has put a huge strain on Equestria's economy, and morale is so low that fanaticism, propaganda and terror are the only things just barely keeping the Empire afloat. Plus more natural born ponies (at least those that haven't been fully brainwashed) are starting to question Queen Celestia's campaign and are either defecting to humanity or get thrown to the gulags.

In Origins, a second invader arrives before the damage from the first has even been repaired. These newcomers push the heroes back constantly, and every play made ends up being countered, culminating in the loss of the Citadel's entire galaxy. Only timely intervention by one thought to be an enemy lets Shepard & Co. live to fight another day.

Film

Subverted in the Terminator franchise (at least the first one) as there is a Hopeless Robot War fought in the future — hopeless for the robots, hence the time travel. The war was still quite brutal, and bleak for the humans, as a good chunk of humanity got hit by several Depopulation Bombs. Terminator Salvation double subverts it by showing that time traveling has actually made things worse. The T-800s come in a full ten years earlier and humans only have normal weapons (which we all know do nothing against the 800s), not plasma guns from the first version of the war, and while the main network and production base is destroyed along with a large number of unfinished 800s it's heavily implied Skynet has many many more. However, it would seem Skynet didn't go as heavy on the Nukes this time and the humans have A-10s and tanks. Skynet is also much harder to kill now. The original had one central computer controlling everything which could be destroyed, the one that got started in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was software distributed pretty much everywhere.

TRON: Legacy involves the distant aftermath of one of these between Kevin Flynn and Clu. Kevin struggled against Clu after he began his coup to take over the Grid, but because Clu was largely created from Kevin's own body and personality, any attempt Kevin made to fight Clu just made him stronger. Ultimately, Kevin retreated and removed himself from the struggle, having long since been resigned to his fate.

In Reign of Fire the humans certainly feel that way about their fight for survival against the dragons while the dragons simply want to eat.

This is essentially one of the main themes of the Godzilla franchise. So long as humans engage in war, another Kaiju will inevitably show up to wreak havoc. To make matters worse, a good portion of Kaiju are Nigh Invulnerable unless attacked by certain non-conventional weaponry (and even then it's a one-in-a-million-chance) which turns the war against giant monsters into an endless effort to just simply keep them at bay.

As for Godzilla himself, the original 1954 film implies that there can't be just one Godzilla. The sequels confirm this showing that there is an entire species of Godzilla (and a breeding population if Minya and Junior are any indication) meaning that humanity (Japan in particular) is in a constant no-win war against an entire species of enraged radioactive dinosaurs capable of destroying a city within hours.

What the war with the Kaiju was becoming in Pacific Rim. The Kaiju were learning to adapt against fighting the Jaegers and destroying more Jaegers until only four remain active. Not to mention the Pan Pacific Defense Corps was pulling funds away from creating and maintaining the Jaegers to focus on building the Kaiju Wall that claims to protect the surrounding countries from the Kaiju.

The one waged by mutants of the future in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Their eradication by the Sentinels is a predetermined outcome; even with Kitty Pryde's Mental Time Travel powers, they can only postpone their inevitable demise.

Fury (2014) is set in the last days of World War II. The Allies are marching through the German heartland, the regular Wehrmacht are surrendering in droves, and most civilians are happy to see an end to the war. It's obvious to everyone still holding the Sanity Ball that Nazi Germany is finished, but the remnants of the SS are still fighting bitterly on and using any dirty tactic to, at the very least, cost the Allies a little bit more: Child Soldiers, luring Americans into towns and then shelling them, really anything goes. In one notable scene to compound this, the protagonists see hundreds of Allied bombers streaking across the sky, and they look across the sky to see a measly five German fighters flying out towards them to intercept.

Midway (1976): Adm. Yamaguchi: "Once, we filled the sky with our aircraft. Now we win or lose with six fighters and ten torpedo planes."

Independence Day: With humanity's first counterattack failing, the revelation that the aliens' shields are powerful enough to withstand a nuclear blast, and the revelation that in the next 36 hours they will be joining the long list of species wiped out by the invaders, the War of 1996 is looking like this, that is until David gets an idea from his father that can take out the aliens.

There were a couple of hollow victories, usually excised in the numerous adaptations.

Notably, this (along with I Will Fight Some More Forever) is averted, in that when these hollow victories deflate some of the Martian hubris, the invaders find a way to strike with even greater impunity. Once it becomes clear that no further victories can be expected, it is explicitly stated that all organized resistance falls apart.

This is sort of a weird one. The "hollow victories" are the result of artillery. This happens to have been an arm in which the British army was extremely backward at the time (this was ground home by the 2nd Boer War, only a couple of years later). Leading to the supposition that if the Martians had landed anywhere else in Europe things might have been a little more hairy for them. Of course, this is Completely Missing the Point.

David Gerrold's The War Against the Chtorr novels depicts humanity slowly being overwhelmed by an invading alien ecosystem. A quoted text in Season for Slaughter mentions a psychological condition called 'Red Queen Syndrome' where people alternate between fanatical attempts to defeat the Chtorr and a hopeless sense that all their efforts are in vain. The hero Jim McCarthy and his love interest 'Lizard' Terrelli are both caught up in the cycles of this condition. The quoted text depressingly concludes that there is no real cure as the perception that Resistance Is Futile is likely to be all too accurate.

Stephen Baxter's Exulant novel details the Scary Dogmatichumanity's obsessive war against all other aliens in the galaxy. As the story opens they've been sieging the Xeelee center of operations in the centre of the galaxy for several thousand years. The Xeelee are, well, just doing their thing and occasionally zapping the annoying primates.

In P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath series, the Kencyr people have been fighting a losing battle against the forces of chaos for 30 millennia. Little surprise that they're burned out — and then when nothing happens for the last 3 millennia from the point of view of most of their population, little wonder they try and forget the hopeless task.

Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet has two factions of humanity fighting a space war to a stalemate for the past 100 years. The toll of the war has resulted in regular atrocities by both sides and so many deaths that battle tactics aren't even used anymore since everyone who knew them died before they could teach the next generation. It is hinted that unseen aliens have been manipulating the war in the hopes that the humans will wipe each other out.

In the aptly named Final War of Keith Laumer's Bolo series, both sides are so effective at sterilizing planets that the best either the humans or Melconians can hope for is that the other side will overlook an out-of-the-way colony world or two.

In The Dresden Files, the White Council of Wizards has been engaging in one of these against the vampires of the Red Court since the third novel in the series, and it hasn't been going well for them, partially because the vampires took out the Council's foremost expert on vampires early in the war and a traitor within the Council has been feeding information to the vampires. The Council has just barely been holding on, and the only thing that saved them from being wiped out was the intervention of the Summer Court of Faerie. Then, in Changes, the war comes to an abrupt and literally heart-stopping end when Harry Dresden arranges to use a bloodline curse to kill every Red Court vampire at once.

Unfortunately, the war with the Red Court may have simply been a diversion to weaken the White Coucil and blind them to their true enemy, the Circle.

Codex Alera (by the same author) has the threat of this in the form of the Vord (openly inspired by the Zerg). According to Kitai and Doroga, the (currently nomadic and somewhat primitive) Marat once lived elsewhere, implied to be in another dimension / on another planet, (they lack the vocabulary to properly express it, and don't consider it particularly important) and had an advanced civilisation that was utterly wiped out by the Vord, leaving only a few refugees to flee and try to build new lives elsewhere, and when they successfully built a new culture, the same thing happened again. During the series, the Vord start another war of extermination, and by the end of the last book Alera is safe for now, but the vast home continent of the Canim has been obliterated, along with the vast majority of the Canim species, and the surviving Vord queen living there is expected to invade Alera in a century or so. Despite this, the series ends on a hopeful note, as the unintelligent Vord legions are a Keystone Army that only functions within a few-mile proximity of the queen, and the surviving queen is unable to create more queens to lead her forces, meaning that if she is killed (difficult, but by no means impossible,) the Vord in that world will be permanently crippled. However, it is very clear that if the first queen had not been forced to create sterile daughters due to her initial contamination by Tavi, the future would be totally hopeless for all other species.

The Gun fights one of these against the Line in The Half-Made World. No matter how much death and destruction the Agents of the Gun wreak, the Line's resources are essentially infinite and they always end up pushing the Gun back. Subverted in that it's strongly implied that this suits the Gun just fine - it is literally the embodiment of belligerence and grudges and the romance of fighting for a lost cause, so winning would be against all it stands for. It also helps that despite being constantly driven back, the Gun can no more be permanently defeated than the Line can.

The First Galactic War in The History of the Galaxy can be seen as one in several novels set during the conflict. Originally planned as a single decisive strike by the President of the Earth Alliance to scare the Lost Colonies into falling in line and accepting refugees from the overpopulated Earth, the defiance of the Dabog colony to the bitter (radioactive) end serves as an inspiration for the other colonies to band together against the aggression. While Earth has the technological advantage for most of the conflict, the colonists do manage to one-up them in several areas, even developing an Anti MatterWave Motion Gun that's used only once due to its unpredictable nature, frequently resorting to We Have Reserves tactics against the superior cybernetic systems used by the Alliance. It becomes a typical war of attrition, lasting for many decades, where whole fleets are occasionally sacrificed to gain a moment of respite. The horrors of that war continue to echo for many centuries and hardly any novel fails to mention how devastating it was and what mechanical monstrosities it bore.

The war with the Sh'daar in Star Carrier novels, especially the early ones. The Sh'daar have proxy control over most of the galaxy, while the Terran Confederacy exists on the fringes of their empire. When the Sh'daar became aware of humanity, they immediately demanded that humans become their vassals and agree to give up certain branches of technology (specifically, the four techs that are supposed to lead to The Singularity). When the humans refuse, the Sh'daar send one of their militant vassals, the Turusch, to force the humans to reconsider. It's made pretty clear that the Confederacy has no hope to defeat the Sh'daar, especially if they bring in more of their vassals to fight humanity. At most, humans can hope to force the Sh'daar to leave them alone. It ends up working quite by accident when a Confed fleet ends up traveling to the Sh'daar past; the Sh'daar, afraid of temporal paradoxes, immediately sue for peace. They then resume hostilities when an even greater threat emerges.

David Weber's Safehold series begins with the last remnants of the human military going into the final major battle of the decades-long war against the Gbaba knowing they're going to lose and that following the battle the Gbaba will descend on Earth, the first and last planet humans occupy, to wipe everyone out. The series then transitions to the hidden colony of Safehold nearly 1000 years later which eventually becomes embroiled in a global religious war that results in massive suffering.

Live Action TV

The Cylons from Battlestar Galactica nuked most of the humans and are hunting down the few tens of thousands of survivors in an ongoing costly war. In fact things got so bad the crew of the Pegasus started to cannibalize civilian ships for spare parts.....by force. It became somewhat of a hopeless war for both sides after the Cylons lost their resurrection technology.

The War of the Worlds TV series has The Squad, called the Blackwood Project (which also has The Cavalry as back up) fighting remnants from the original 1950s invasion guerrilla style. The Blackwood Project has it hard— their resources aren't too vast, since society mysteriously forgot about the original invasion for the most part. And the US government would like to keep it that way.

The Mor-Tax aliens don't have it very easy either, as they have to struggle to adapt to earth and free their comrades and war ships that are being held in military storage. Which, of course, is hard due to the interference of the Blackwood Project. In fact during the second season one of the leaders of the second wave of aliens (the mothren) questioned another lead mothren over the choice of picking planet earth in the first place.

Most of the time neither side ever actually accomplished anything, outside of stalemating each other. And if either side actually got a victory it was usually a very hollow one.

Babylon 5 has the Earth-Minbari War as a backstory, in which the Minbari all but obliterate EarthForce and arrived at Earth with the intent to genocide the planet. Even John Sheridan's big victory against the Black Star only served to piss off the Minbari more. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the war is that the humans managed to hold out as long as they did, in spite of the massive technology and power imbalance. Only when the Minbari learned something so soul shatteringly important about Humanity at the last moment did they stand down. The Expanded Universe adds that the war was just as hopeless for the Minbari, as not only they had engaged in genocide to avenge a single man (thus ruining their reputation as the leaders of the Younger Races), and Human desperation tactics had caused them losses they couldn't afford with their population decline, but by the time of the last battle EarthForce had crippled the Minbari economy, to the point that, even twenty years later, between that, the Shadow War and the Mibari civil war, they couldn't rebuild their fleets sufficiently and get nearly overran by the Orieni.

An alternate timeline in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" has the Federation fighting a losing war against the Klingons.

An alternate universe in another episode had a badly damaged Enterprise that was one of the few Federation ships remaining and "The Borg are everywhere".

The Borg themselves were on the receiving end of this trope in their war against Species 8472.

Played with in the Deep Space Nine episode "Statistical Probabilities", in which a group of genetically engineered supergeniuses ( by which we mean "can deduce correctly that a political leader is a 'pretender to the throne' who killed his predecessor's daughter and took power just by watching said man give an unrelated speech") state that they have studied the state of the Federation's war with the Dominion and have found that the Federation has absolutely no chance of victory. Their prediction indicated that even if they got lucky with Romulan aid or an anti-Dominion coup on Cardassia (both of which ended up happening), the war was hopeless. The only hope was to surrender and endure decades (if not centuries) of oppression until an Earth-centered revolution would bring about the rebirth of even better Federation.

Unfortunately, unbeknownst to these geniuses, the Dominion leaders were already planning to wipe out every living thing on Earth once it was conquered; specifically, to prevent exactly that kind of organized rebellion down-the-road.

Ultimately subverted, as the war was over about a year and a half later, with the Federation victorious.

On top of that, the geniuses' plan to bring about the Federation's surrender in light of this was thwarted by their fourth member turning on them, leading to the Kirk Summation by Bashir amounting to "even you guys couldn't predict what was going to happen in that one room, let alone the galaxy; people can Screw Destiny anytime."

An alternate timeline in Star Trek: Enterprise has the Xindi succeeding in pulverizing the Earth and then starting a genocidal hunt for the remains of humanity.

"The Doctor's Daughter" has two groups of clones engaged in a hopeless war within the ruins of a crashed spaceship. Subverted when it's revealed that the war has only been going on for slightly under a week.

"The End of Time" revealed that the Time Lord-Dalek war ended up as an example of this. The Time Lords became morally corrupted to the degree that the war ended up being between two different types of Omnicidal Maniac, as the Daleks wanted to destroy every living thing in the universe that wasn't a Dalek and the Time Lords wanted to escape the war by destroying the entire universe so they could ascend into energy beings. Whole planets full of people were time-looped to be repeatedly resurrected only to die horribly again, and the damage to reality was unleashing several sorts of Eldritch Abomination on the universe. At which point the Doctor decided to use "the Moment" to obliterate both sides for the sake of everyone else.

In an Evil Versus Evil example, "Destiny of the Daleks" introduced the Movellans, a race of humanoid robots locked in a centuries-long stalemate with the Daleks. Neither side could gain an advantage because both sides relied on supercomputers to calculate battle strategies, and they were so evenly matched that neither computer could come up with a plan that the other couldn't immediately anticipate and counter.

Stargate SG-1 had a mild version of this trope. Much was made of the superiority of Goa'uld technology and the near-hopelessness of a war against them, especially in the earlier seasons. The last episode of Season 1 showed us an alternate Earth where the Goa'uld were slowly but unstoppably obliterating city after city. In later seasons, there was an episode where it turned out Teal'c never truly believed the Goa'uld could be defeated, and a number of episodes where every seeming victory over the Goa'uld just seemed to make things worse in the end. On the other hand, the Goa'uld's over-the-top villain act (often lampshaded in the show), the Villain Decay of their mooksnote Humans on Earth progressed technologically, while the Goa'uld mostly didn't, the seeming lack of urgency to their threatnote Earth was relatively well-defended thanks to the Stargate Iris, and its location in space was mostly unknown in the first season, then protected by the Asgard starting in the third season, the heroes' gradually growing mastery of alien technology, and the overall very low Good Guy casualty ratenote Of course, SG-1 is the only group that experienced no casualties: other SG teams were mixtures of Red and Mauve Shirts, made this a particularly comfy and non-threatening Hopeless War.

Falling Skies: the world's military has been devastated, and civilians are all that's left of any real resistance.

The story of a woman on the morning of a warRemind me, if you will, exactly what we're fighting for...Throw me to the woods because there's order in the packThrow me to the sky because I know I'm coming back

Space 1889 played straight or subverted depending on perspective. A Martian trying to fight off humans is likely to feel this way if he is being honest with himself. Mars has been drying, developing backwards and diminishing in numbers for at least two millennia. Humans on the other hand are breeding like vermin and are constantly developing new and better machines, particularly weapons. Even a major victory is unlikely to reverse these trends and will thus be a very hollow victory.

The Tyranids, a race of psychic locusts that eat planets, have attacked the galaxy 3 times, being held at bay only by strokes of luck and the sacrifice of billions — and those 3 attacks are just Tyranid scouting fleets, the Tyranids having possibly eaten several other GALAXIES before heading to ours. And on top of that two of the three scouting fleets are still operational, the thousands of splinters of Hive Fleet Kraken are still roaming around in the fringe devouring worlds with impunity while Hive Fleet Leviathan is still barreling on toward Terra fighting the Orks but another two hive fleets are coming to reinforce them. And even if they fall, there are hints - here and there - that something even worse is chasing them.

Chaos is sending out stronger and deadlier incursions from their alternate universe than ever before — and all it takes is one properly psychic person turning to Chaos to allow them to attack anywhere, anywhen.

The Orks, being a race of fungus-people, are everywhere (killing one releases spores that grow more Orks) and nearly impossible to get rid of. The only thing preventing them from taking over the galaxy in very short order is that they have just as much fun killing each other. However, Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka is trying his damnedest to fix this problem.

The Eldar are dying, having destroyed themselves accidentally creating a rogue god/dess of lust — and it's strongly hinted that the only way the Tyranids or Necrons can be fought off is with the Eldar outfitting all of Humanity with their ancient superweapons, which is humanity is too xenophobic to use any ways. Their Plan B? Capture enough Eldar souls in hypertech soul capturing crystals that they can create another god — this one a god of Death.

The Dark Eldar are missing these hypertech soul capturing crystals, so they keep the god/dess of lust away by causing as much random pain and misery as possible, by doing slave raids and torturing the slaves to death. It doesn't work perfectly — they slowly lose their souls to the god/dess anyway, so their plan is to just steal OTHER souls to replace their own.

The Tau may be the most "hopeful" or "positive" civilization in the setting — as long as you ignore the concentration camps, the fact that their race has been under the sway of impossible to disobey avatars of The Virus for millennia, etc. They even have active scientific progress and actually understand their technology. The problem? Because they're completely un-psychic their faster than light travel is much slower than that of other factions, and they're right smack dab in the path of the Tyranids... Oh, and one of their generals appears to have broken out of their racial mind control, which is a very very bad thing as the leaders of the race have spent 5000+ years on a breeding program to make their warrior caste the biggest, baddest, most bloodthirsty Tau possible, under the assumption that they'd never, ever be able to disobey.

A bit of a subversion though in that Tau society remains stable and (compared to a good chunk of the Imperium) relatively safe. In addition, since they're also one of the few factions that actually give a damn about understanding and advancing technology, it wouldn't be out of the question to have them developing a reasonable counter to the Tyranids given enough time. Also, their almost non-existent Warp signature means that they pose a potent threat to Chaos.

Also the more negative parts mention above are either imply somewhat or Imperial Propaganda. And its heavily implied the break away is still fighting for "the greater good" just in his own way.

The Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM) books have a lighter take on the setting. Humanity isn't as xenophobic as first stated and is willing to work with other species, the more brutal of humanities' minions are offed by disgruntled citizens and soldiers, and many worlds are downright pleasant to live on.

One small relief is that the war is hopeless for Chaos too. Tzeentch, the God of Magnificent Bastardry, is in fact in a Hopeless Warwith himself. Tzeentch would die if any of his myriad plans succeeded as he'd have nobody to scheme against and nothing to change if he ever won, so he deliberately sabotages his own plans and creates plans which run contrary to each other by design. Because of him, Chaos cannever win. Ever.

Orcs are still there. They outnumber mankind and most other races combined. As usual the only thing keeping them from taking over the world is the lack of unity.

And their skewed balance of quantity over quality. Green life is cheap.

The forces of Chaos are as numerous and deadly as ever, except that they have hordes of mutants and beastmen hiding in the woods (who, again, outnumber mankind), the spells that keeps Hell Itself from breaking through the barriers of reality are steadily weakened... And as the army book proclaims: "Against the daemons of chaos there can be no final victory."And they did win in the end... Though, it's continued in Age of Sigmar.

Adding to that are the cults dedicated to chaos, anything from individual hamlets and small covens to entire human armies that have turned to chaos and are actively fighting for it from within the Empire's borders...

The Skaven has been undermining all of civilization for ages, they are arguably the most technologically advanced race, with huge amounts of Magitek.

A more localized example is the Elven civil war, where the somewhat-less evil side has been fighting their psychotically evil kin for millennia. Both sides having suffered so much in the fighting that they are going extinct. Oh, and the latest plans of the psychotic versions have included undoing the abovementioned spells that keep the world safe from the denizens of Hell...

The last, best hope against the forces of chaos is a race of man-eating lizards, who only has a fraction of the knowledge they once had and have trouble coordinating their actions at that.

Not to mention the fact that their plan is to separate all the races and lock them up in different spots of the world.

In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the werewolves and other shapeshifters are losing a Hopeless War against the unstoppable cosmic force of corruption that is warping the Earth and will, very soon, either destroy humanity and all shapeshifters, or reduce the planet to a Hell on Earth. The shapeshifters know they are hopelessly outmatched and cannot win, and most don't believe there'll ever be a recovery after the Apocalypse. But they are determined to die with honor and dignity, resisting to the last.

The Forsaken are locked in three major wars at once: against the Hosts, vicious half-spirit entities that want to either cut the spirit world off permanently (the Azlu) or rip its walls down (the Beshilu), the spirit world itself, and a faction of their race known as the Pure which views them as heretics. The Hosts are nigh-impossible to kill permanently. Nine out of ten spirits are more powerful than the strongest werewolf, and they tend to be extremely hostile towards living things. And the Pure collectively outnumber the Forsaken.

The majority of Mages have been divided into two major factions which have continuously been at war since before recorded history, with no signs of it letting up ever. Both sides have goals which could be considered simultaneously altruistic and incredibly selfish, and even within the two groupings there is much infighting, backstabbing, and vicious politicking. If Mages don't fall into these two groupings, they are either 1) individuals who choose to go it alone and have little to no support network and probably won't last very long, 2) self-hating magic haters who have basically declared war on all other Mages, and will pursue this goal with fanatical single-mindedness, 3) members of the so-called "Left-Handed Legacies" which even if they aren't serving the agenda of some manner of reality eating monster, will still do some truly reprehensible things (cannibalism, soul-eating, etc.), or 4) dead. And then there's the constant struggle against the Abyss, which isn't so much a reality eating monster as it is a reality.

In Shards of Alara, the Grixis plane plays host to such a plight. In a world bereft of white and green mana, the last traces of humanity are left to fight a hopeless battle against demons, necromancers, and armies of undead.

The Kamigawa block set also featured a hopeless war inspired by Japanese mythology, where mortals fought against the immortal Kami, powerful spirits that inhabited all things.

Phyrexia: Originally a five year story-arc consisting of enemies to the entire Multiverse made of both machine and flesh. Originally defeated only through a huge war and the sacrifice of many main-characters to the story. Phyrexia is back as of "Scars of Mirrodin" and have turned the plane of Mirrodin into "New Phyrexia" despite the best efforts of the Mirrans to fight them off. The last humans and other Mirrans are holed up in tiny refugee camps, alive and free only because the victorious horrors can't be bothered to kill them as long as they aren't a threat. Which they aren't.

Zendikar: In all honesty nothing on Zendikar or even Zendikar itself can stop the Eldrazi. These are eldritch horrors that eat reality itself. It's so one-sided that it can't even be considered a war; to the Eldrazi it's basically pest control and harvesting.

Until Oath of the Gatewatch, when the bodies of two of the Eldrazi titans are fully pulled into the plane and killed with the aid of Zendikar's soul. As Ugin warns, however, this could have some unforeseen consequences.

The Planescape Campaign setting has the Blood War: an eternal struggle between Lawful and Chaotic Evil, both of which possess infinite amounts of troops, that has been going on ever since the two forces first met. It paused, twice - once to assess the threat of the Illithid Empire, and once when the forces of Good tried to intervene directly... and were utterly stomped. Most forces not directly involved are desperately trying to keep the fight going, for fear of what would happen if either side actually *won* ...

Cthulhu Tech, anyone? In the grim darkness of the not-so-far future, humanity is on the losing side, what with the Migou (your unfriendly neigborhood Starfish Aliens from Yuggoth) holding the poles, the whole of Russia and chunks of Canada (together with Alaska), Scandinavia, Manchuria and Korea (both North and South) in their insectoid/fungoid/crustacean hands/paws/whatever; the Ax-Crazy Rapine Storm rolling through Asia towards Europe; and the Esoteric Order of Dagon everywhere at sea. And each side hopes to bring upon The End of the World as We Know It, at least for the New Earth Government. To be fair, the NEG doesn't always lose, but their chances of winning the Aeon War are pretty much zero.

Mass Effect 3 begins with the Reaper invasion of Earth. Most of Earth's fleet are massacred before they can inflict any damage, and the only possibility for victory is for Shepard to escape from Earth, leaving the Reapers in control as s/he tries to build an alliance to take back the planet and defeat the Reapers. The rest of the game only serves to drive the point home that, while individual Reapers can be defeated with incredible effort, their fleet as a whole is completely unstoppable. There really is no hope of winning conventionally.

To put in perspective just how badly things are going, the turians are the biggest Badass Army the galaxy has, and they are the ones holding out the best against the Reapers, even managing to kill a couple in fleet battles. They report battles with an 85% mortality rate, and their homeworld is on fire within days of the invasion. Everyone else in the galaxy, with the possible exception of the krogan after forming their alliance with the turians, is far worse off.

Previous victims of the Reapers had it even worse: the Reapers would attack the Citadel – the center of the mass relay network, and also always the center of galactic government – completely out of the blue, overwhelm its defenders, and essentially win the war in a single stroke. It's entirely thanks to a few Prothean Popsicle survivors from the previous cycle, who disabled that tactic, that the current cycle even had a ghost of a chance.

Two Atari 2600 games, Imagic's Atlantis and U.S. Games' M.A.D., were also based around the same premise.

Gears of War has a bleak war going on between humans and a race of subterranean mutants called the Locust who literally come from up under the ground and begin to slaughter everything and everybody. Ironically and cruelly, most of the human casualties comes from the human military scorching the planet (along with civilian survivors) with orbital laser satellites in order to stop the rampaging hordes of Locust from commandeering cities and equipment that may be of use to them. Now the humans are fighting a dire guerrilla war with the Locust. In the first game you unleash a massive bomb that is supposed to either destroy the Locust or cripple them so badly that they cannot recover, you're treated to a cutscene of the bomb gloriously detonating and wiping out a ton of Locust, then the Locust Queen reveals that the Locust have survived and the war is far from over. The second game brings new developments in the war: a lethal disease known as Rust Lung that comes from exposure to Imulsion, the COG's main fuel source, and the fact that the Locust have a new weapon that can destroy entire cities, forcing COG onto the offensive to wipe out the Locust. However, it becomes apparent that the Locust are fighting their own losing war against humanity as well as the Lambent. By Gears of War 3, the COG has disbanded. However, the remnants form an alliance with their old enemies to hit both the Lambent and Locust's last strongholds and finally, a superweapon which removes the parasite in Imulsion is unleashed which kills all the Lambent and Locusts on the planet. Ending the Hopless War once and for all.

The humans of the UNSC had possessed hundreds of colonies throughout the Orion Arm. Then the numerically and technologically superior Covenant attacked, glassing entire planets from Harvest to Reach. In short order, humanity is pushed back to only its inner colonies and Earth itself, with humanity taking roughly twenty three billion casualties (from an estimated pre-war population of over 39 billion), and any hard-won victories doing nothing more than delaying the inevitable. What's sobering about this war, besides the massive casualties, is the fact that the UNSC was filled with legendary badasses from the top of the chain of command, such as Admirals Cole and Whitcomb, all the way down to Marine grunts, like Sergeants Marvin Mobuto and Avery Johnson. And that's not getting into its SPARTAN Super Soldiers, like the Master Chief himself. They were STILL nowhere close to winning or even ending the war. The only reason humanity ultimately survives is because the Covenant falls into a massive civil war, which ends up also killing off most of its remaining leaders (the rest having been nommed when the Flood overrun their capital of High Charity).

Let's put it this way: in only two months towards the end of the war, the Covenant loses over 200 ships attacking Reach (more than the entire fleet humans had available to defend it), as well as an armada of 500 ships and a massive supply station (due to the Heroic Sacrifices of Admiral Whitcomb, a Spartan, and an ONI agent). The Covenant leadership considered the first no great loss, and the second nothing more than a minor, if irritating, setback. That's how outgunned and outnumbered humanity was during the war; even early in the war, when the Covenant was dedicating such a small percentage of its forces that humanity actually held the numerical advantage in space, the UNSC was still forced on the defensive.

By the Halo 4 era, humanity is partly recovered from the war, having even surpassed the Covenant in some technological areas thanks to an influx of Covenant and Forerunner tech. The Infinity is the largest and most advanced human ship ever built (not counting ancient humanity) and can go toe-to-toe with most Covenant ship and win. There's also the SPARTAN-IV program, a re-tool of Project ORION (AKA SPARTAN-I) involving the "upgrading" of veteran soldiers to Super Soldier status with hardly any genetic restrictions, unlike the earlier SPARTAN-II and -III programs. Their MJOLNIR armor is also superior to even the IIs', while also being much cheaper. Basically, given enough funding, a whole army of SPARTANs can be created with no shortage of volunteers.

All that being said, while the dissolution of the Covenant has given the UNSC breathing space, the chaos has also created new powerful factions which still seek to finish the job against humanity. Additionally, successor conflicts to the Covenant civil war (Elites vs. Brutes, pro-human Elites vs. anti-human Elites, etc.) are still being waged throughout the Orion Arm, with no side being able to gain a decisive upper hand (a fact made worse by many factions having to struggle to reteach themselves science and engineering even as more and more valuable infrastructure and equipment is lost each day).

The main background lore of the franchise revolves around the Forerunners attempting to save themselves and all other life in the Milky Way from the innumerable (and technologically superior) Flood 100,000 years before the Human-Covenant War. Eventually, the Forerunners become so desperate that they activated the Halos, killing all sentient life in the Milky Way (except for those chosen few stored in safe zones in order to reseed the galaxy afterwards) to starve out the Flood.

Wing Commander sometimes portrayed the war against the Kilrathi as hopeless, especially in the Tie In Novels. So much so that the only way that humanity could come up with to win was a desperate strike against the Kilrathi homeworld, completely destroying it and killing millions, if not billions of civilians to demoralize the entire race. The fact that it works is a miracle.

Sin and Punishment: the story of the game takes place in the near future, where nearly everyone has been screwed over into becoming psychotic killer mutants of any given breed. But it's the sequel that really drives home the trope: it's revealed that humanity only exists because some Sufficiently Advanced Aliens called the Creators need a massive supply of Red Shirts to fight against Eldritch Abominations from another dimension (remember Achi? She was just one of these abominations, and pretty much the whole of the first game came about due to her actions). There are seven Earths, and whenever a strain of humanity grows too peaceful for the Creators' tastes, they wipe out all life on the planet and replace it with monstrosities called the Keepers, which are to defend the planet until the Creators can re-seed it with human life.

One of the major themes of Half-Life 2. In the 'Episode' expansions it's heavily implied that even if the Combine occupation forces are driven from the Earth, the retribution from the Combine proper will be even worse than their current regime.

All accounts seem to suggest that the Combine are going out of their way to preserve humanity in order to turn us into slaves (thanks to Doctor Breen's "efforts"), and that they need but a nudge to destroy us all utterly. Let's hope that the Freeman-Vortigaunt team-up shakes things up a bit more, then.

The Earthsiege series portrays the Cybrid onslaught as nearly unstoppable, with the heroes' efforts to stop them being as much about luck as anything else.

Total Annihilation. To paraphrase the intro, after 4,000 years of total war that exhausted the entire resources of the galaxy, the shattered remnants of the two sides' armies now battle viciously to the death on each world, and the only acceptable outcome is the complete and utter elimination of the other. Though subverted in that one side does eventually win...

This is one of the possible endings in Alien Front Online, where the war between humanity and the Triclops becomes a near-permanent stalemate with millions of casualties on each side.

Killzone ends with taking Vekta back from the Helghast invasion, though it took them many years and many deaths to accomplish. Killzone 2 looked like the end of it, after invading Helghan and reaching the Emperor's Palace, until you witness a large Helghast fleet loom over the capital shortly after Rico kills Scolar Visari. This after most of Vekta's navy was mostly obliterated and the remaining ground forces had made their last desperate attempt to reach Visari to end the war.

It wasn't Vekta's navy, it was the ISA fleet, as in the entire human forces and the Helghan fleet was most of their force (hence why Visari claim "We have lost nothing")

The ISA managed to pull a last minute victory from the Helghast which involves triggering the Petrusite Bomb, which came at the cost of billions of Helghast lives.

The Resistance series. A war that mankind is losing because their enemies, the Chimera, are so advanced that everything the humans have tried against them has been proven either obsolete (like the anti-Carrier serum in Resistance: Retribution. Even if James Grayson succeeded in killing off all the Carriers with it, it did nothing at the end, since the Chimera had already changed their conversion methods beforehand) or ends up failing horribly (examples in question: the British capturing an Angel in the second game, basically becoming bait for an attack, and the Fission Bomb in the second game ended up triggering the teleportation of Earth into some other place in space). It's also implied that Daedalus'planworked. And finally, with most of the key characters either dead or incapable of recovering from The Virus, the situation just keeps getting worse. However, in the third and final installment, The human managed to pull through with a cure and the more obvious problem was solved through liberal application of firepower from an One-Man Army.

As of the end of Resistance 3, it seems that the hope is back into the world.

The Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series, and its titular Tiberium Wars slowly became this over the course of its existence, the war started in 1999 and while there were moments of peace, the entire conflict didn't end until the third Tiberium war in 2049, with a smaller flare-up occurring all the way in 2077. Over the course of the wars, two different third parties have attempted to end all life, Tiberium, which originally started the war, has taken over half the world, and is slowly, but surely, turning earth into a Death World, yet GDI and Nod keep going at it.

The dwarves are fighting one against the darkspawn. Due to the darkspawn's overwhelming numbers, as well as the dwarves' low population and slow birth rate, they are slowly losing, down to only two cities (which hate each other). It's made worse by the fact that a large portion of their population is not allowed to fight, due to how dwarven culture forbids the massive surface-caste and castless population from serving as warriors. It's theorized that if the dwarven culture doesn't change soon, then it will be destroyed, even if the dwarves live on. Depending on your decisions in the first game, things may start looking a lot less bleak for them, even getting human troops to help out. Or, you could inadvertently cause them to be permanently sealed off from the surface...

While it hasn't reached full-scale war, the Tevinter Imperium has spent eighty years or so fruitlessly trying to drive the Qunari off the island of Seheron. As the Qunari once fought everyone else in the setting and almost won, Fenris doesn't think much of the Imperium's chances if they go on the offensive. "I believe the Qunari are saving their strength, building a massive fleet. When they wish true war, we will know."

Jade Empire had ghosts overrunning the Empire thanks to the Sun brothers massacring the Spirit Monks and enslaving the Goddess in charge of the dead. There was no hope of winning: every ghost disrupted would eventually reform, and everyone killed by a ghost would eventually become one. And to make matters worse, the imbalance caused by the appearance of the ghosts is empowering demons.

Gratuitous Space Battles is set in a galaxy where everyone is at war with everyone else. The Alliance and the Order are on genocidal rampages to wipe out everyone who isn't them, The Empire is out to conquer whatever parts of the galaxy they don't rule already, the Swarm are invading with their endless fleets, the Nomads are bored and think riddling others with laser beams is jolly good fun, the Rebels are fighting to overthrow the Empire and survive amidst all these crazy lunatics trying to wipe them out, the Parasites need more hosts, the Outcasts have a grudge against organics and the Tribe have decided that the only way to bring peace and harmony to the galaxy is to blow everyone else to atomic ribbons. And all of the above owe The Federation money, and their "Contract Enforcement Division" is coming to collect.

In the backstory for the upcoming Dawn Of Victorymod for Sins of a Solar Empire, Earth is invaded by aliens in the middle of World War 2 à la World War by Harry Turtledove. Despite the Scinfaxi (human name for the invaders) miscalculating the human level of technology, they proceed to Curb-Stomp Battle humans to the brink of extinction using their Humongous Mecha. Humans only once manage to score a decisive victory by luring the enemy into an ambush in a major North American city and then proceeding to shell the city with massed artillery barrages, scoring a blow to the alien forces at the cost of an entire city. The Soviets manage to capture a supply of plutonium from a Scinfaxi convoy and use it to build an atomic bomb. The detonation wipes out most of the enemy forces in the region. Seeing this, the Americans, the Germans, and the Japanese follow suit, forcing the Scinfaxi to retreat to the Southern hemisphere. Until nukes are built, this pretty much fits the trope.

Myth perfectly illustrates the situation - the Empire of Cath Bruig has been razed leaving only a barren desert, the Free Cities of the North are under threat, and every day the Fallen Lords gain more ground.

The Elder Wars in Lusternia, fought between the Elder Gods and the Soulless Gods: not only did the Soulless outnumber the Elders, they ate them upon defeat and gained their powers. The Elders tried the same tactic against them, but it didn't go so well.

This is how the war in Valkyria Chronicles was viewed by many Gallians before Alicia's Valkyrur side awakens, as Gallia was severely outnumbered and didn't have many of the technological advances that the Imperials did. In fact, the battle in which the spoilered event occurs would have guaranteed Gallia's defeat had said event not happened.

A gameplay example: in MOBA games like League of Legends it is possible to realise your team is going to lose in the first 5-10 minutes, or even before the match starts (bad champion matchup in blind pick mode in LoL) but you cannot surrender yet and are forced to keep playing and getting your face kicked in by a team that keeps getting stronger until you can finally surrender - assuming there are less than two people on your team that choose to decline the surrender vote and keep fighting a hopeless battle. And since an early '11 update the winning team is encouraged to drag out the game for as long as possible to get more influence points.

You can get worse situations in games like Dota 2, where surrender isn't possible outside of professional games. While no one gains from dragging out the game, and massive comebacks are more likely in Dota, there is still the occasional game where one team will insist on defending for hours, potentially, before they can be defeated.

In Digital Devil Saga, it's heavily implied that before the events of the game, the Junkyard was in a perpetual stalemate. To the point where an alliance is almost unheard of. This is quite intentional on the programmers' part, as the Junkyard was conceived as a training sim with the ultimate purpose of creating combat AIs capable of responding under duress to any situation that popped up. This was to be achieved by restocking lost units and shoving adverse conditions on the commanders to force them to keep thinking of new strategies while never giving them any data or idea that could lead to an actual chance of winning, which would end the sim without ever completing its purpose.

Alien Legacy has this as its backstory and is the entire reason for the game. You are the captain of the colony ship UNS Calypso, sent to a remote system as part of a last-ditch effort to ensure humanity's survival. Earth is in a losing war against the Centaurians. While both sides are at about the same technological level, humans are limited to one system, while the Centaurians have already settled at least one other system (Tau Ceti is mentioned). They are also significantly more aggressive than your average human, and this ferocity is what's driving their desire to obliterate humanity. After a failed final offensive (contact lost with the last fleet sent to Alpha Centauri), the Earth governments unanimously vote to switch to a defensive strategy and start building colony ships. Each ship's crew is to maintain radiosilence and assume the loss of Earth and all other colony ships. By the time you arrive to Beta Caeli at the start of the game and wake up from your Human Popsicle state, hundreds of years (if not millennia) have passed, and there have been no word from Earth besides a few messages several decades after the launch.

The premise of Muv-Luv is this, humanity discovers the BETA which quickly overwhelms humanity taking over Eurasia and reducing the human population to just 1 billion and with most of the world's adult male population dead frontline nations have started to cosncript females as well as teenagers and still humanity only has about 10 to 15 years left before complete extinction. It does get better in the Alternative timeline where they destroy the BETA original hive on Earth and destroy its leadership allowing the slow retaking of Europe and Asia. However there are at least 10^37 BETA in the universe and Mars has a Phase 9 hive while the largest on Earth was only Phase 6

Epic Mickey: Before Mickey came to the Wastelands, Shadow Blot and the Mad Doctor had pretty much won the Blot War; they have conquered Oswald's castle and petrified his wife Ortensia, an act which sends him into a deep depression and causes him to lose his will to fight, leaving the fighting to small, weak bands of resistance groups. One of them, the crew of Captain Hook, has most of the members dead or turned into Beetleworx and the rest scattered leaderless in the jungle. Another group, The Gremlins, has been more successful in fighting off Blot's forces, but the sheer force of Blot's forces causes most of the Gremlins to be taken as prisoners, and their own village was under siege before Mickey helped in turning the tide.

Overlapping with a Forever War is the war between the Shinkoku race and the Gohma from Asura's Wrath. The Shinkoku Trastrium civilization has fouight the Gohma, the embodiment of the planet's rage, for countless eons, with no clear victor on either side, with Vlitra, the leader of the Gohma factions, growing stronger and bigger with each awakening after being only subdued each time. This causes the 127th emperor, Strada, to lose hope that the war will ever end, and would rather have the Shinkoku move to a different place across universe and abandon their home planet of Gaea. This actually sparks the main plot, as Deus, the other Big Bad, as well as a Well-Intentioned Extremist, to betray strada and pin the blame on Asura to exact his plot to use TheBrahmastra to blast Vlitra into oblivion once and for all.

To make this fact even worse, Chakravartin, who created the Gohma in the first place to test the Demi-gods and see if he can find himself an heir amongst them, says that even if Vlitra were destroyed, he can make more Gohma at will, and implies that he has destroyed countless galaxies with the Gohma since time immemorial, and will continue to do so in the future.

There are three main factions, the Americans, the Vikings, and the Celts. There were also minor factions remaining, like the Sioux. While life isn't great for any of them, it is likely pretty freaky being a one city state in a world where nukes are casually thrown around everywhere.

The Giant War in the backstory of Dark Souls II. The Giants were so enraged by King Vendrick stealing something very important to them that they continued to invade Drangleic for generations heedless of the losses to their own side. The Giants were eventually driven away for good after the Undead Hero went back in time and defeated the Giant Lord but the damage was done. The double whammy of the War and the onset of the Undead Curse doomed Drangleic.

The war against the Ur-Quan Hierarchy in Star Control turns out this way, as the second game begins with you finding out that your side lost the war, and the rest of the game is based on building up alliances and trying to regroup, while never entertaining the possibility of taking on the Ur-Quan directly. If you waste too much time though, another example comes up, as the Kohr-Ah (the Ur-Quan's meaner, nastier brothers) start exterminating every race in the sector, ending with you.

Possibly subverted however, in that while the Alliance of Free Stars did lose the war, the Chenjesus immediately began work to catch up to Ur-Quan's technological superiority. There's also the fact that the Ur-Quans still possess the Sa-Matra, which allowed them to decisively win the first war. The primary goal of the 2nd game was finding the Sa-Matra's whereabout and destroying it, and once it's out of the picture, the Chenjesus (now the Chmmr; part of that catching-up involved a Fusion Dance with their partners the Mmrnmhrm) immediately showed that their current tech and military might is more than a match to the Ur-Quans', and won the war.

The Dragonsong War for Isghard's history in Final Fantasy XIV has lasted for a thousand years between the people of Ishgard and dragons. Nidhogg, the leader of the brood that has been in the war, started the war because of his eye being yanked out by Isghardians a thousand years prior. The war itself has been more or less a stalemate with neither side gaining any advantage over the other while both sides have suffered heavy losses of life. You don't get a chance to alter the course of the war until the Heavensward storyline and you find out there's more to the war than you heard. The war actually started when King Thordan and his twelve knights kill Nidhogg's sister and ate her eyes to gain more power. Nidhogg wanted revenge and led his brood to war, which eventually cost him an eye. Your allies theorize that Nidhogg could have easily destroyed Ishgard many times over, but had chosen not to do so and purposely prolonged the war just to make mankind suffer as long as possible until A) everyone dies from the war or B) everyone gives up in despair and become dragons via drinking dragon blood.

World War II is this for the former Allied Powers in the alternate universe of Wolfenstein: The New Order, where the Nazi war machine under General Deathshead's leadership has grown into such a technologically advanced superpower that not only does the war stretch out another three years, but the Allied Powers are so thoroughly outmanned and outgunned that the war in Europe is all but lost before a last-ditch effort by the Allies to kill Deathshead ends in disaster. Following this defeat, the Nazis deploy the first atomic bomb against the United States, forcing the would-be superpower into submission as the Nazis go on to betray Imperial Japan and to crush resistance from both the Soviets and China, effectively establishing Nazi rule over the entire planet and declaring the war over; the next fourteen years sees the Nazis completely level several major cities such as London all over the world, replacing them with cities more suitable to the Nazi ideology and expanding their reign of terror to every corner of the globe, with the Final Solution being applied to every person deemed undesirable by the Nazis and violently putting down any attempts at resistance with their superior technology. It's only after fourteen years that BJ Blazkowicz, one of the only soldiers to cross paths with Deathshead and live to tell of it, comes out of his comatose state to find that resistance is all but crushed, with the survivors forced underground as they can expect no help from a now thoroughly defeated US; only a few pockets of resistance in Africa and elsewhere still thrive, fighting a losing war against the Nazis as they slowly but surely wrestle away the few territories that have so far refused to submit to their rule. Blazkowicz's revival and recruitment into the Kreisau Circle where he reunites with many of his wartime comrades reinvigorates the resistance and they are eventually able to discover the source of the Nazis' advanced weaponry and begin to turn the tables against Deathshead's brutal regime, Eventually killing Deathshead himself in an act of Heroic Sacrifice, but the Nazis will spare no expense in quashing the few who remain to challenge their brutal oppression of the world abroad.

The Korean-American War in Homefront breathes of this all throughout the campaign; reinvigorated by its annexation of South Korea, Japan, and numerous Pacific nations in the wake of its newfound nuclear and economic might, North Korea establishes itself as the dominant superpower of East Asia and under the reign of Kim Jong-Un spreads false messages of peace as it tightens its grip on the world abroad as the globe is ravaged by economic depression, disease, and the decline of American influence politically and militarily. Taking advantage of this, the North Koreans paralyze the with an EMP that blacks out all vulnerable electronics nationwide and irradiates the Mississippi River, paving the way for a massive invasion in which the entire continental US west of the Mississippi has been occupied, with Hawaii and Alaska in tow. Without the US Army able to enact an organized and decisive counteroffensive, the Western United States is defined by a system of totalitarianism that sees the North Koreans indiscriminately imprison and massacre droves of civilians with or without provocation, mass graves, the loss of power, food, and all critical infrastructure, disease, starvation, and constant fear of being tortured by the North Korean Army. A few pockets of American resistance are all that stand against the North Koreans in the absence of the US Army or its overseas allies, and every attack against the enemy risks massive reprisals against the civilian population. That said, the situation bodes badly for a shattered United States that doesn't have the fuel, technology, or reach to drive the Koreans out of their country.

With the success of a desperate counterattack against San Francisco and San Diego due to the help of the American Resistance, there is newfound hope that the United States can defeat its Korean oppressors, with the European Union ordering an emergency session to debate military and economic aid to the United States' war effort.

The war in Homeworld certainly starts off as this for the Kushan, who in their quest to find their long-lost homeworld Hiigara which was lost to them thousands of years prior invite the wrath of the very empire who enacted their exile, with the brutal Taiidan Empire exterminating all life on their surrogate world of Kharak and wiping out all of their families and comrades who made their galaxy-wide journey possible; to establish the desperation of this state of affairs, all but approximately 600,000 Kushan are still alive in the aftermath due to the blind luck survival of their fleet, most of them colonists who have been cryogenically frozen for their eventual arrival on Hiigara, with no children among them. And if that weren't bad enough, the Taiidan have enlisted of the Turanic Raiders to quash the survivors. Suffice to say, the Kushan are desperate to ensure the survival of their kind when it becomes apparent that they are waging a desperate war against an empire they remember almost nothing about.

Hope returns however when the enigmatic Bentusi open up trade with the Kushan and provide them with the technologies necessary to wage open war against the Taiidan, giving them the firepower need to be a serious threat to the Empire's vast armada. As word of the Kushan's return spreads and as their fleet grows in strength, the galaxy begins to rally to their cause as does a small but powerful Taiidan rebellion that has become disillusioned with the Emperor's genocidal regime, forcing the Empire to fight on two fronts and paving a path for the Kushan to strike at the Imperial Seat of the Empire that occupies their homeworld.

The entire point of playing as Western Roman Empire in Total War: Attila. It is the first faction in the series to have a "Legendary" faction difficulty. You start in control of the largest empire on the game map, but 80% of it is at risk of rebelling in the first 20 turns. Everyone hates you, so there will be a constant stream of barbarians attempting to carve chunks out of your empire for themselves. To make matters worse, corruption and disease are rampant, and it turns out that all those barbarian tribes are actually fleeing from the Huns, who will show up on your border around turn 100, and unlike everyone else, don't conquer and settle, but simply raze towns to the ground and move on. Up to Eleven if you set the game difficulty to Legendary as well, which disables the minimap in battles, autosaves before and after every battle and turn and doesn't allow any other saves.

A lot of the Total War games in general will see the AI get itself into examples of this trope quite a lot. Do not be surprised if a one-region city state tries its luck against a (usually player-controlled) vast empire with infinitely more wealth and military manpower. Curb Stomp Battles tend to ensue.

In Evolve, the conflict between the humans and the monsters. On one side, three galactic superpowers with massive amounts of resources and thousands of years of technological advancement over present-day Earth. On the other, an extradimensional force that pushes into our reality in the form of a horde of monsters that can rip through planetary defenses like they weren't there, constantly mutate new strains to become even deadlier, and can appear on any planet with no warning.

Super Robot Wars V: The war between the Earth Federation and Neo Zeon in the Universal Century world is turning into this. Unlike in canon, the Getter Ray pollution from Saotome Institute and the Second Impact devastated Earth right after the Federation forces took Solomon. Because of this, even though the Federation still won the One Year War, anti-Federation forces were able to grow unhindered while the Federation was too busy rebuilding Earth. Fast forward to 15 years after the One Year War, the Earth Federation is now locked in a stalemated war with Full Frontal's Neo Zeon, which is now an actual army instead of the underground organization depicted in Unicorn. The situation has gotten so desperate that even Mithril, normally a neutral organization, is assisting the Federation simply to stop Neo Zeon from destroying Earth completely.

Webcomics

In the Sluggy Freelance story "That Which Redeems," the Dimension of Lame is pretty much helpless before the Dimension of Pain demons, largely because Torg's the only person in the entire dimension who isn't a complete pacifist (most Dimension of Lame residents aren't even comfortable with the idea of food fights). The only thing stopping the demons from completely overrunning the Earth are their small numbers and Lord Horribus's poor decision making.

Gone with the Blastwave: We're not given a whole lot of detail about the wider war, but the city where the action takes place has been so thoroughly wrecked by the fighting that its strategic value is probably close to nil, and yet the three factions are still at it.

Web Original

Tech Infantry features an Earth Federation that is in two endless Hopeless Wars at once. The first is against The Bugs, large insectoid aliens that never seem to be defeated, no matter how far they get pushed back at the cost of horrific casualties. The second is against itself, in a seemingly endless series of Civil Wars, coup attempts, resistance movements, and supernatural secret wars carried on behind the scenes inside the very power structure itself. Even when the Eastern Bloc conquers the Federation, beats the minor alien races along the border into submission, and seems to finally reach some sort of low-grade stalemate with the Bugs, the former Federation military-political power structure becomes the NEW La Résistance, carrying on the tradition of endless civil war from the other side of the barbed wire. Meanwhile, the Vampires, Mages, Werewolves, and other supernatural creatures continue their private and not-so-private power struggles as usual.

In The Salvation War, the forces of Hell find themselves in this situation when they try to conquer 2008 Earth and Humanity kicks their tails and proceeds to conquer them!.

The end of Worm, where every parahuman including those kept in the Birdcage, and the Endbringers, are fighting a losing battle against Scion. The only thing that saves humanity is Taylor merging parahumans from the local multiverse into a hive mind that would be able to develop a superweapon capable of winning.

The Anglo/American – Nazi War is an Alternate History where the Nazis win against the Soviet Union and force the Western Allies into a stalemate... until the Nazis launch a chemical weapons attack on several countries including Britain, killing 50,000 people including the Queen Mother and all her children. When the infuriated Allies invaded Europe and killed the bejesus out of the German military, the increasingly desperate and insane Nazis resorted to systematically destroying Europe's cultural heritage including the French cities of Paris, Reims and Orleans, and pretty much all the arable farmland in the Netherlands and using indoctrinated children as suicide bombers. The Allied responsewas little better.

The few humans in the world of RWBY are sequestered into four tiny pockets of civilisation which are constantly under siege by a race of Living Shadoweldritch horrors called the Grimm. The militaries as well as the Huntsmen and Huntresses are just enough to hold the line, but all attempts to break out and expand have ended in failure.

Western Animation

The war in Avatar: The Last Airbender lasted for nearly an entire century. By the finale of the show the nation of the Air Nomads had been wiped out, the Southern Water Tribe had been reduced to scattered villages, and the Northern Water Tribe had retreated to within its own borders. Vast areas of the Earth Kingdom had been claimed as Fire Nation colonies. The two major Earth Kingdom cities, Omashu and Ba Sing Se came under Fire Nation control. The only things standing against the Fire-Nation were small uprisings and guerilla armies. And then the comet came, giving the Fire Nation the ability to literally burn the continued resistance to the ground... of course, the good guys win, but without the Avatar they were basically screwed.

Much like in the comics section, the Bad Future of Wolverine and the X-Men. The war against the Sentinels can't be won, because there's a limitless supply of Sentinels, who can learn and adapt to their enemies techniques, and they're evolving super-powers of their own. What's left of the world is a burnt out wreck, and there's no visible signs of humanity left, just ruined cities everywhere.

The Soviet military theorist Alexander Svechin separated all wars into two categories: 'Wars of Annihilation' whose outcome was chiefly determined by the military efficiency of the combatant organisations, and ''Wars of Attrition' whose outcomes were chiefly determined by said organisations capacity for replacing their losses. If the combatants have sufficient military efficiency, replacement capacity, and political will to prosecute it until the final victory/defeat then an Attritional conflict can be utterly ruinous even for the victor.

The War of the Triple Alliance. Paraguay decided that it would be a good idea to invade Brazil and crushed their army. Then, as if that wasn't enough, they went to war with Argentina and Uruguay at the same time. Paraguay won early victories, but ground down over six years. The war only ended with the complete conquest of Paraguay by the Alliance and the death of their dictator. Over half of the prewar population of Paraguay died before they finally surrendered. It got to the point where the Roman Catholic Church decided to allow polygyny (the "multiple wife" type of polygamy) because so many men had died there weren't enough husbands.

The American Civil War was initiated by the Confederates under the presumption that it would be a quick and decisive engagement. By no means was it imagined just how long it would drag on, resulting in tens of thousands of casualties even for the most strategically insignificant of skirmishes such as at Gettysburg, and result in the absolute economic deconstruction of the South, resulting in an After the End scenario whose aftershocks continue to reverberate to this day.

Union chief of staff Winfield Scott predicted at the beginning of the war that it would last four years and require a complete blockade of the South, along with a slow strangulation accompanied by massive battles of attrition. This was derided by just about everybody as the "Anaconda Strategy" and Scott was soon ousted from command. As it happened, the war followed his prediction in almost exact detail.

The war might have been over soon had the North been adequately prepared for war. Instead they were caught on the wrong foot after the Confederates attacked Fort Sumter. The War department headed by the corrupt and incompetent Simon Cameron failed to meet the challenge for immediate mobilization and organization.

If you watch the excellent Ken Burns documentary about the war, you can't help but wonder how many excellent opportunities to win the war right then and there George B. McClellan squandered throughout the first years of the war. True, Lee was a competent military leader, but more often than not all his competence got him was getting away, bleeding the (superior) Union forces and living to fight another day. Once competent commanders were put in command on the Union side (Sherman, Grant etc.) the economic, manpower and technological advantages of the North began manifesting themselves in Curb-Stomp Battle s, though the South always remained a dangerous foe in every individual battle.

After a while, the South's goal wasn't even to win, but instead to achieve recognition of the Confederacy by European powers (similar to what the United States itself did in the Revolution). They almost got that... and then Antietam ended in a draw and Lincoln used the opening to release the Emancipation Proclamation. Suddenly the Confederacy lost every chance of such recognition; if Britain or France recognized them as a sovereign country, they would be declaring support for slavery, which was something they would never do. This left the South's only hope with Northern stupidity, and after 1863 that was in short supply.

During The French Revolution, the uprising of the Vendée against the National Convention. If it wasn't this from the start it soon became this. An assemblage of badly equipped, ill-trained and badly armed peasants against the largest and in many ways most modern army in Europe. Some of the former officers and aristocrats who were asked to lead the "Royal and Catholic Army" felt compelled by their sense of honour and loyalty (to the king, the church, or their fellow Vendéans), but had no illusions how it would end. For instance, Maurice Gigost d'Elbée said: "it's the fight of the earthen pot against the iron pot".

Napoleon Bonaparte's final campaign leading to his defeat at Waterloo. For all that the day was won by the resolve of The Duke of Wellington and Blucher's arrival as well as Napoleon losing his edge finally, the campaign was hampered from the start by the fact that Napoleon's army hadn't recovered from the Russian invasion as well as the 1813 Battle of Leipzig. Their only hope was for Napoleon to somehow pull off a stunning victory and this time the magic was gone.

A lot of the countries that Germany invaded and occupied during the opening year of World War II felt as though they were trapped in an example of this trope. Many of them surrendered after very short periods of time - epitomised by Denmark who, knowing that their small area and very flat terrain would make the Germans' task incredibly easy, surrendered after just TWO HOURS in order to spare their people the pain of a war that they didn't have a hope in hell of winning.

The last leg of World War II was a pretty good example for the Nazis. The foot soldiers obeyed Hitler till the bitter end, despite knowing fully well that German defeat was inevitable. Any government and people not convinced that they were about to be exterminated by near-human beasts (i.e. the Communist Asians under Jewish domination) would have sued for peace. Compare this to the end of World War I, when the previous German government chose surrender when it became clear that they were less than a year (at best, and six months at worst) from total military defeat; sparing their country the ravages of a drawn-out war on their own soil, but also conceding to the monetarily light but emotionally humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The consequences of this decision was the creation of the Weimar Republic.

Japan at the end of WWII. By the end, they were literally fighting the whole world. Germany had surrendered and Italy, along with others of Japan's allies, had pulled a Heel–Face Turn, leaving Japan to fight on alone against The Allies. This was the phase of the war that added the world 'Kamikaze' to the English language. Even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, several generals had an audience with the Emperor wherein they demanded the right to fight on. The reason why the Emperor surrendered remain a subject of debate but it's possible the Soviet invasion of Japan played a part (better occupation by the US than occupation by the Soviets).

WWII was this for Germany and Japan as a whole on a larger scale; in the long term, their early successes could almost be described as illusory and postponing(and worsening) the inevitable. The Soviet Union alone outproduced Nazi Germany by a factor of 6 to 1, to name just one Allied Power.

The Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s, a decade long stalemate which achieved absolutely nothing. Saddam's Iraqi military was too hopelessly corrupt and unmotivated to make any headway despite adopting chemical weapons, and too much of the Iranian military was inexperienced and ill-trained for them to make any headway either despite their superior staffwork and motivation. When one side is gassing villages and the other is sending runners to clear landmines by foot, neither side is expressing much hope for the aftermath.

The Bosnian War was this for the Bosniaks until 1994. After being abandoned by Serbia and the combined Bosniak-Croat offensive it briefly became this for the Republika Srpska with a little subversion: The Bosnian Serbs returned in time to the negotiation table and got the best outcome of the war.

Pretty much the entirety of Native American interaction with the colonizing Europeans on two continents. Attempts by native populations to resist European colonization and maintain self rule were ultimately hopeless in the long run regardless of any transitory victories, given disparities like the Europeans' technological edge and their introduction of new diseases.

The Western Front of World War I seemed like this for years. There were great offensives on both sides, millions died, but the front lines didn't move. It took a series of events, Russian and Italian victories against Germany's allies, the arrival of the United States, the October Revolution and the Spring Offensive to force Germany to surrender.

The Italian front of World War I. For the Italians, because their officers would continuously send them attacking well-fortified Austro-Hungarian positions uphill in the face of large artillery and machine gun concentrations. For the Austro-Hungarians, because no matter how many Italians died in futile attacks, they could replenish their losses (in fact the Italian commander in chief Cadorna, knowing that his army was underequipped due to endemic corruption in the bureaucracy and the only previous commander in chief who understood modern weapons died of heart attack before he could make any impact, was counting on this) while the Austrians couldn't, and Italian artillery was superior and growing. Then, thanks to the Russian collapse freeing up the troops from the Eastern front and temporary German help in the form of assault troops, the Austro-Hungarians broke through Italian lines atCaporetto... And things got even worse, for them: the Germans were transferred on the Western front, the part of the offensive sent to occupy the area with most of the Italian weapon factories was obliterated on the Grappa massif by a ludicrous concentration of artillery even for Italian standards placed there exactly for that purpose, the Italians may have been at their limit of manpower but were still more numerous and, as they were now fighting for the defence of their country, had suddenly started to fight like demons, Cadorna, who was incompetent as a field commander, had been replaced by the more versatile Armando Diaz, Italian special forces started being everywhere (they even dropped leaflets on Vienna itself just to prove they could have bombed the city), and Austria-Hungary had exhausted their reserves.

Afghanistan; especially after the Wiki Leak files made it seem bleaker. There's a reason it's known as the "Graveyard of Empires"; the British and the Soviets both tried to extend their control there, only to get bogged down in an endless conflict with almost nothing to gain. There aren't many local resources of note, and its only strategic use is as a corridor between South Asia and Central Asia, hence its long status as a buffer zone between viable empires in those areas.

The Second Punic War was this for Carthage, as Rome's strategic advantage came from leading an alliance of many Italic peoplesthat allowed them to raise multiple armies with little trouble, an alliance that Hannibal, in spite of his efforts, could not break where it counted. This became evident after the Battle of Cannae, in which most of the Roman army was destroyed: Hannibal hoped that his victory would break the alliance and scare the Romans into suing for peace, and to make sure he sent an ultimatum to Rome, but while the Greek colonies and the Samnites did switch sides and the Macedons (from Greece) saw this as the right moment to settle their own dispute with Rome and entered the war, the Etruscans, the Umbrians and the Latins, that is the largest (and, in the case of the Etruscans, the richest) Italic peoples and the ones placed right around Rome, remained loyal, resulting in Rome quickly raising enough troops to torment Hannibal's army with guerilla tactics and attack all of Hannibal's allies (Macedons included) and his bases in Spain and still have some spare manpower and replying to Hannibal's ultimatum by demanding the rent of the public land occupied by his camp.

The Third Punic War even more so, from the Carthaginian perspective. Imagine the situation: your once proud civilisation, which used to have a great empire stretching across your known world, has been reduced to a single city and the land immediately around it. You've been beaten, twice, by a people for whom war is the national pastime, and now they're coming to finally finish the job. Their territory covers the entire western Mediterranean, they've proven time and time again how good they are at war, and now 80,000 of them are outside the gates. When they get in - and, really, you know they will - they will kill or enslave everybody. And there is nothing you can do to stop them.

The Jewish Revolts against the Roman Empire can be seen as this. You have on one end a group of people who are fighting for their faith, taking cities and defending them to the last man (occasionally literally — Josephus was the only prisoner taken from Masada), or fighting guerrilla campaigns that needle the enemy's weak points. On the other side, you have one of the most powerful empires in existence, going to enormous lengths to bring out and break the revolting cities, up to and including moving mountains. When it ended, it resulted in the expulsion of an entire religious group, and came at a massive cost to the Roman Empire.

The Syrian Civil War has become one of these. The Government and allies ,Rebels ,the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria(ISIS) and Kurdish groups are in a war against each other with no end in sight and the Rebels themselves are not a single entity and are in fact several groups with ideologies that range from secular democratic to Islamic extremists that are no different from ISIS themselves and unsurprisingly infighting is common to the point that some fight other groups than fighting the Government or ISIS. While the Government has most of the population as of 2017 controlling 65.5% they only control 34% of Syria and ISIS has most of the oil rich areas. Everyone is willing to kill civilians to get rid of their enemies using sucide attacks ,chemical weapons and shelling civilian areas without mercy just because they are under enemy control. A large amount of Syrians are either dead or fled the country and most of the country is in ruins so even if one side wins Syria will no longer be the same.

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